Making exploders is a distinct operation, requiring great precision. The materials of which the priming for fuses is composed, are prepared in my private laboratory, and consist of sulphide and phosphide of copper with chlorate of potash. Considerable nicety of manipulation is required to prepare the former of these compounds so as to obtain homogeneous, uniform sulphides and phosphides, and, from the failure of several chemists—and some of our best have attempted the manufacture—to prepare them, I attach great importance to this work, invariably making them myself. For, if prepared with the above ingredients, no accident can occur from atmospheric electricity, friction etc., a contingency which all other primings now in use are liable to. The priming is then taken to the warehouse where from three to four hands are employed in making it up into exploders. Two insulated wires from 4 to 12 feet long, are inserted in the smallest end of a wooden tube, previously dipped in boiled paraffine, ¾ inch long and ⅛ inch diameter at one end, and 3/16 at the other, to which they are fastened by a shoulder of gutta-percha. Immediately before the priming is inserted, an electric spark is passed through and between the wires where the priming is put so as to ascertain that the insulation is perfect, and to guard against the possibility of a miss-fire. This being proved, the priming is put in at the other end of the tube, and a small paper plug boiled in paraffine inserted; then a copper cap, ¾ inch long and ⅜ inch diameter, receives 20 grains of fulminate of mercury, on the top of which a varnish is poured which prevents any of the fulminate from being shaken out by accident, or affected by vibration. This copper cap is then placed in a larger wooden cap 1½ inch long, the fuse inserted about ¼ inch, when it fits tight, the wooden part painted with asphaltum varnish around the joints, and the exploder is complete and ready for service. Three hands employed ought to make 1,000 a day of these exploders.
Having thus given a full account of the manufacture of Nitro-Glycerin and its appurtenances, I will conclude with the remark that there is no danger in the manufacture when due precaution is used; but, to paraphrase the language of Professor Tyndall, in his preface to “Hours of Exercise in the Alps”: “For rashness, ignorance, or carelessness, Nitro-Glycerin leaves no margin; and to rashness, ignorance, or carelessness, three-fourths of the catastrophes which shock us are to be traced.”
CHAPTER VI.
Explosive Mixtures.
The laws of nature are immutable. To-day, to-morrow, forever—unchanged, unchangeable, as the great Creator himself, who established them, and it is only from scientific research, starting with the conviction that these laws are God’s laws, and therefore immutable, that results of general utility can be obtained. Believing that everything which, in common parlance, is termed “an accident,” is simply a violation of these laws through carelessness or ignorance, it is the duty of the scientific chemist to investigate the causes and effects of the adherence to or violation of these laws in regard to the science of which he is a student. As a chemist I have accordingly applied myself to a close examination of the phenomena attending the preparation and use of Nitro-Glycerin, and consequently to the investigation of the mixtures purporting to be substitutes for Nitro-Glycerin and gunpowder, of which Nitro-Glycerin is the active base.
And this brings before me, in all their glaring defects, the anomalies of the patent system of our country, especially in regard to chemical compounds. For the past hundred years, the greatest chemists the world has ever known, have given the results of their researches free, and untrammelled by any patents, though they might, indeed, have justly taken toll of the world at large for their discoveries. I need only instance Berzelius, who threw open to the world the numerous discoveries of his long and valuable life, and Pelouze, the celebrated French chemist, who devoted fifteen years of his life to the investigation of the constituents of fatty matters and their decomposition into stearic, margaric, oleic acids and glycerin. Let the reader picture to himself, for a moment, what would have been the state of affairs in the manufacturing world, had all the chemists of the last fifty years patented every discovery they made, every mode of preparation they suggested; how dark, gloomy and uncertain would the path of our manufactures have been; they must almost have stood still until these patents, and perhaps their renewals also, had expired. By such a course, the bleaching and printing of cottons, and all the numerous processes dependent on applied chemistry, would have been deferred half a century; for it is only by the quick, free application of the discoveries of the unselfish chemist, that the progress that has been made was possible. What a contrast to the self-aggrandizement of the present race of patent-seeking chemists! An individual, with the labors of the grand army of scientific chemists for the past hundred years before him, selects one, two or three chemical compounds, mixes them, modifies to a certain extent some property of either of them, applies for, and obtains, a patent. Then for seventeen years this “ghoul” sits over his mixture, and, with the assistance of a lawyer, proceeds to black-mail any one, who, in attaining certain results, is led by the properties of the several compounds to avail himself of a similar mixture. The discovery of a Sobrero is attempted to be appropriated by a Nobel and his assignees, and, with the confidence inspired by the weakness of a patent examiner, who chuckles at the delusion of the patentee, they absolutely infer that, because they have a patent, they can appropriate the result of the chemist’s labors obtained 20 years before. The patent office secures $35.00, the examiner his salary, and the ceilings of the noble building at Washington are ultra-marined, until the visitor’s eyes are dazzled with the brilliant color. Finally comes a suit in chancery, in which thousands of dollars are expended, and in which these stealers of other mens’ brains, count less on their claim than on the hope that they may so interfere with their opponent’s occupation, and so deplete his pocket with law-costs, that he will submit to accept a free license, at least, and thus enable them to terrify others into payment.
The above remarks are somewhat of a digression from the subject of this chapter, but, I think most of my readers will admit that they are by no means uncalled for. I have been told, and the newspapers teem with assertions, that these patented explosive compounds, with high sounding names, will bear “tamping” as hard as gunpowder, are safer, more powerful and cheaper than Nitro-Glycerin. We are a people, Barnum says, who like to be humbugged; I am afraid we are not the only people who like to be humbugged—it is a weakness of humanity—but this I do believe; the man who is addicted to humbug, had better give Nitro-Glycerin a wide berth, that is, if he hopes to end his days on a feather bed.
Let us briefly examine these patents—the Lord deliver us from all such—for explosive mixtures, and see the amount of invention required.
For a mixture of Nitro-Glycerin with rotten-stone, a patent was granted, and (the name being the only real invention) it was called “dynamite.”[9]